The Mountain Ford

A single rider in a red jacket guides a white horse through shallow water, and he is so small that you could easily scan past him. That is Thomas Cole's trick. Everything in this 1846 canvas is scaled against that tiny figure: the craggy peak rising behind him, the dense woods crowding the banks, the enormous gnarled tree on the right whose roots grip the rocks like fingers. Cole painted the horseman last in the order of importance, but he is the reason the mountain feels as tall as it does.

Cole was born in England and came to America as a teenager, and he more or less invented American landscape painting as a serious pursuit, becoming the founder of what we now call the Hudson River School. His scenes often look like real places but rarely are. This one blends remembered Catskill scenery into an idealized whole, with the composition borrowed from seventeenth century European masters: dark framing trees on one side, a hazy blue distance on the other, light pooling in the middle. Painted two years before his sudden death at forty-seven, it carries the thing he worried about most in his later years, namely that the American wilderness was vanishing fast under axes and roads. The rider crossing the ford is passing through, not staying, and the forest closes behind him.